Principles of web design is a clear way to explain how each web design project is unique. Website designers must give up their preconceived ideas about what a website should look like in order to create truly unique and impactful compositions. They should instead use the brand value, audience, and unique selling point as guides throughout the design process.
In spite of the fact that designing is all about breaking the rules and creating your own, there are principles of web design that must be followed for your webpage to be considered great. We’ve compiled a list of tested and trusted recommendations to help your website look friendly and responsive while engaging your visitors. Today, we’ll talk about 13 failsafe principles of web design.
Let’s take a look at some of these principles of web design
Keep Your Visitors In Mind
Design is centered around satisfying the user, customer, or visitor. Keeping them in mind when designing is therefore one of the key principles of web design. Each element of the website, including its fonts, colors, and buttons, should be designed to suit the major needs, pains, and desires of the target audience.
Avoid Big Chunks of Text
There can only be one first impression, which is why you want to webpage’s design to be as appealing as possible. You want to give them a great and lasting first impression that makes them want to come back and stay on your website. Despite the important role copy writers play, design also has a great deal to do with creating this impression. Using large amounts of text will drown your brand message and make your site look clumsy and unattractive.
Use Readable and Web-Optimized Fonts
Typography is an important part of web design and one of the principles of web design that cannot be overlooked. Using the right fonts will help communicate your brand message properly, but it’s more than just using pretty fonts. Typefaces must be legible and web-friendly, otherwise, your visitors may have difficulty reading your text. The importance of this principle of web design cannot be overstated. You can see which fonts are best for your next web design here.
Clear Concise Messaging
Krug’s First Law of Usability is “Don’t make me think”. Users hate to think, this is because thinking takes time and the average human attention span has reduced drastically in recent times from 12 seconds to 8 seconds according to this research, this means users want to get your message in that time. Writing in codes or ambiguous language will only leave your visitors stressed and frustrated, which will translate into higher bounce rates that will eventually hurt the business. Go straight to the point. This is one of the principles of web design you can’t overlook.
Prioritize User Experience
UX designers aren’t the only people that should be concerned with user experience. Anybody that wants visitors to take an action on their website (from subscribing to a mailing list to signing up) must be concerned with the user journey. As one of the principles of web design, prioritizing user experience is making sure your user has a smooth navigation through your website, the functionality of the website is optimized and call to actions are clear and minimal.
Keep Your Design Consistent
For you to have read this far in this article, it means you already know that consistency is key in design. However, this goes beyond keeping your fonts and brand colors the same across all platforms, it also means the spacing in your design layout must stay consistent. This is one of the principles of web design that helps to give your website a professional look and feel.
Pay Attention to Details
Your visitors might not look out for some of the very little details in your website, but paying attention to those details in your design is what makes your website stand out. Everyone wants to see the big picture, how images, texts and colors blend in the design, but as a designer it is important to pay attention to some of the little things like, your site footer icons, the micro-interactions, your text spacing etc. This helps to really set your website apart and shows that it was professionally designed.
Consider Using Grid System
When you design with a grid layout, you make your work look consistent, neat, and well-organized. You can use grids as guides to place and align the elements in your design. Grids consist of horizontal and vertical lines intersecting. Using this tool will help you create designs that are consistent and arranged.
Design For Both Web and Mobile
As a great designer, you must have it at the back of your mind that your webpage will do better and gain more traffic if it is responsive both on web and mobile. According to a study in 2019, mobile generated web traffic was about 48.71 percent in the first quarter, this figure has managed to hover around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017. If this principle is ignored, your business might be losing over half the traffic it could get.
Aim for Simplicity
One of the very recent principles of web design is simplicity, design is fast becoming minimal. Less is more. Websites with simple designs are more appealing to the eyes and more relaxing to the mood. People would rather return to a simply designed website and interact with it, than one that is busy.
Make Use of Effective Writing
Writing for the web is not exactly the same as writing for print or any other form of media. If you write for a web using any other type of writing form, the business goals won’t be met. For example long text blocks without images and keywords bolded or in italics, won’t be read. Promotional posts will be skipped because people hate to be sold to. Getting your writing clear and straight to the point, using scannable writing layout (categorize the content, use multiple heading levels and break texts into bulleted lists).
Utilise the F-Pattern
It is human nature to follow our habitual patterns – and the way we consume information is no different. An eye-tracking study by Nielsen Norman Group showed that most of us scan information on a website in an F-shaped pattern. We begin by reading the top headlines, then we scan the left side of the page for numbers, bulleted lists, and sidebars, and across the page for any bolded text or subheadings. An “F” pattern mimics the eye’s natural path so that the visual flow is not disrupted. This is especially important for web pages designed to increase conversions.
Use Negative Space
A space between visual elements in your design; like text, images, icons, etc., is also known as white space or blank space. The thing about these principles of web design is that they are all intertwined. It has been used since the dawn of art, but it is even more relevant to web design. As we mentioned earlier in this article, clutter and clumsiness on web pages are a great turnoff for visitors and will increase bounce rates. Use the negative space well, space your images well, and allow enough distance between icons and texts to avoid this clumsiness. Additionally, the use of negative space attracts the attention of your website visitors to the most important content, increases readability, and enhances the overall user experience.
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